Levi Jordan
Plantation

Definitions

These definitions come from a variety
of sources - let us know if there words in this web site
you'd like for us to include here.

This carved shell "cameo" was found in
the slave quarters of this plantation, and was made by
one of the people who lived there. See "Shell Carver's Cabin" for more details.

ARTIFACT

Any material that was made, modified, utilized
or transported, by past human behavior.

CONTEXT

On one level, context is the
three-dimensional association of artifacts and features
on an archaeological site. It is THE most important thing
that archaeologists study  it is context, more than
anything else, that enables archaeologists to learn about
past human behavior. Individual artifacts do not have
"meaning" unless they are understood in
association with the artifacts, soil, geography, climate
and other things in which they are embedded. Context in
this sense also refers to "artifact contexts"
 which an mean looking at objects in association
with other artifacts, or sometimes it can mean looking at
areas in which few, or no,artifacts exist. See Shadows for an example of this.

However, in a larger sense, context
also includes all of the people who work on the site, or
on materials from the site. This includes surveyors,
excavators, specialists, historians, artists, computer
operators, photographers, videographers and ethnographers
 and their beliefs and assumptions, the historical
and cultural milieus in which they live, and the methods
and techniques that they use to work. For a fuller
description of how these kinds of contexts can be
incorporated into archaeological method, see notes from a
paper given by Ian Hodder, one of the first proponents of
what has come to be known as contextual postprocessual
archaeology (Hodder 1997) (48).

CULTURE

There are many, many definitions of
culture, but sometimes it is useful to think of it in
terms of its characteristics, rather than as a
definition. The following characteristics of cultural
behavior are the ones that tend to be the most useful to
archaeologists  they depend on each other, even
though they differ from each other in important ways.

Culture is LEARNED that is, we
learn the rules about what to do within our culture from
each other. We arent born with these behaviors,
but, rather, we are born with an ability to learn them.
We dont need to burn our fingers to know that fire
is hot  we can learn it from each other. Some
anthropologists disagree, and think that some cultural
characteristics are inherited, not learned. See (Chagnon
1979) (19) for an example of this position.

Culture is PATTERNED  We tend to
do the same things again and again, and, within cultural
groups, we tend to use the same kinds of objects for the
same kinds of activities. Within Western industrialized
cultures, for example, people tend to store certain kinds
of things in certain places in their homes  toilets
go in bathrooms, pots and pans go in kitchens, beds go in
bedrooms, and so on. We can predict, when we go into
someones home, that the pots and pans probably
wont be stored in the bathtub, because we are
members of the same culture. This is the kind of PATTERN
that, if we
know something about the culture,
enables us to start to reconstruct behavior from the
artifacts that remain after the people are no longer
there to tell us what they mean.

Culture is SHARED  If we decorate
something a certain way  a pot, for example 
but other people dont understand why we have done
so, the behavior may be interesting, artistic, and so on,
but is probably going to be very difficult to interpret
by archaeologists. This is not to say that archaeologists
do not have an interest in individual behavior 
they do, and the study of "agency" is a very
important one within archaeology. But behaviors that are
shared are the ones that archaeologists can begin to
understand most easily, even if they are only shared by a
few people.

Culture is CUMULATIVE  it builds
on itself. Consider, for example, at the car. It
"evolved", gradually, from buggies and horses
 the first name for the car was the "horseless
carriage". With the exception of very few totally
new inventions, most things that we use are just newer,
slightly different versions of the things we used before.
The way they are at any given time is the result of minor
changes made over a very long period of time. This is
very useful to archaeologists, who can sometimes see
these changes as they look at cultural materials that
were deposited over a period of time.

WHY IS THE STUDY OF PAST CULTURE
IMPORTANT?

At the most basic level, culture is
what enables human beings to survive in the world. We
dont have a lot of other things that help us do
this, in comparison to other animals  we
arent that large, we dont have fur to keep us
warm, our teeth and jaws are quite small, and we
cant run that fast! But because of the shared,
learned, patterned, and cumulative characteristics of
culture, we can learn (and, more importantly, teach our
children) how to find food, clothe and protect ourselves,
so our species does survive. These kinds of strategies
frequently develop over long periods of time, and
sometimes include some very "big" inventions
 such as agriculture, irrigation, and warfare. Many
archaeologists choose to focus on these kinds of
questions  on the adaptive processes that cause
cultures to change over long periods of time.

But culture is also important in more
local, personal ways. Learning more about the tremendous
diversity of past and present human cultures can give us
insights in how we live today  to get along better,
to understand what made us what we are today, and so on.
Therefore, some archaeologists prefer to look at the
individual ways that a given culture, or groups within a
culture, lived. These archaeologists usually feel that it
is important to acknowledge the roles of individuals, or
groups of individuals, within the larger culture (such as
women and men, children, members of different ethnic
groups, etc.), and often focus their study on these
particular groups or individuals. They are less
interested in making general, large scale comparisons
between cultures, and are frequently interested in very
specific kinds of questions  such as how people
used objects in ritual, religion, social life, politics
and so on, and how they created meaning in the objects
they used. They do sometimes ask questions that have to
do with survival, but they do so in terms of specific
groups at certain points in time and space.

Archaeology has plenty of room for both
kinds of archaeologists, and the answers to both kinds of
questions can influence the decisions we make about how
to live today. What makes us the same, and what makes us
different  both are legitimate kinds of questions
about human life. The Jordan Plantation archaeological
project is an example of the second type of research
 we are interested in knowing how the African and
African-American people who lived on this site lived and
worked, and we are also interested in how they interacted
with and influenced the larger, "dominant"
white planter culture.

CURATABLE ARTIFACTS

These would be artifacts that someone
would presumably take with them upon leaving a place, a
site, a room, or whatever. They would be things of some
value (personal, sentimental, spiritual, material, etc.)
to the person who used them.

DECOMPOSITION PROCESSES (PRESERVATION,
FORMATION PROCESSES)

There are many factors which affect the
way an artifact survives, or does not, after it goes into
the ground and becomes part of the archaeological record.
These include climate, the material the artifact is made
of, soil conditions, and many, many other factors. For
information about these processes, see any basic
archaeological text  one good one is Archaeology:
Theories, Methods and Practice, by Colin Renfrew and Paul
Bahn. See Chapter 2: What is left? The Variety of the
Evidence", p. 41 - 60. (27)

FAUNAL REMAINS

Generally speaking, these are the
remains of animals found in an excavation  bone,
feathers, skin, etc. Studying faunal remains can help
archaeologists determine many things about diet,
occupation, and other aspects of human life..

FEATURE

An artifact that cannot be removed,
intact, from an archaeological site  that is, its
original three dimensional context cannot be preserved,
if it is moved. It could be, for example, a hearth, or a
brick wall, which would have to be disassembled to be
moved. Or, it can be an assemblage of different artifacts
that belong together. For an example of a feature in the
latter sense, see the description of the "curer's
kit" in "Curers Cabin".

HISTORIOGRAPHY

The study of history-writing, or, to
put it another way, the history of history. For example,
if someone were to write about what sorts of things
historians have written about slavery since the Civil
War, that would be an "historiography".

PATTERNING

See "culture is patterned",
above.

SITE

Any physical location that has been
altered by human activity. It is NOT defined as "the
place that archaeologists dig", nor is it
necessarily "a place where people lived"
(although it can be that, of course).